During the final year of our research project, individual members further elaborated their own research themes in accordance with the project's agenda. Also, in the process, the members as a team discussed in depth and coordinated each of their research findings and theoretical analyses.In substance, our project sought to come up with an innovative analytic perspective that would enable us to view the established political regime (so-called the regime of 1955 or the 1955-regime) as collectives of partial equilibriums and then to evaluate the recent years' political reforms as ever shifting processes in which relevant actors are led to depart from status quos that are cemented by a bundle of those partial equilibriums. To consolidate this hypothetical perspective, the members mainly worked on two subjects.First, as a key analytic concept, what we describe as "the 1955-regime can be understood as collectives of partial equilibriums" should be empirically-proof one. Thus, referring to suc
… Moreh theoretical works as comparative institutional analyses, institutional rational choice theories, and rather conventional equilibrium theories, the members elaborated ones' studies and sharpened the concept intensively.Second, in order to verify the concept, we first broke down the regime into three dimensions ; political actors' behaviors, political and policy processes, and policy outputs. And then each member chose concrete topics that would illustrate reforms and changes found conspicuous in those three dimensions. The topics included the followings : voting behaviors and reforms of electoral system, competition among national political parties, local politics and gubernatorial elections, local representatives' recruitment and their policy preferences, cross-national comparison of interaction between bureaucrats and politicians and reforms of cabinets' roles, environmental policies and market-based regulations, and city development policies.In each of these seven topics, the members sought to shed light on puzzles that consist of three concrete questions.1) Under the 1955-regime, why and how could an equilibrium be maintained in a way it did?2) Why and how was it possible for the very equilibrium to be fallen apart? To what extent do the shifting processes evolve from the status quo?3) In what way can a new equilibrium be introduced? Less